Heroku San by Elijah Miller allows you with just one command to turn maintenance mode on, deploy the app, run all pending migrations, restart the app, and then disable maintenance mode.

It works across all heroku stacks, and gives you a heroku.yml file that allows you to configure things like auto-tagging your deploys, specifying heroku config variables, and specifying multi-stage environments.

In late 2011, Rails 3.2 introduced automatic EXPLAIN statements for slow queries in development mode. The Bullet gem which reached version 2.3.0 this week end goes a bit further by notifying you when you should use eager loading, when it’s not really necessary, and when you might want to use counter_cache.

This new version introduces even more speed with 10% faster queries for Active Record 3.0, 48% faster than that for Active Record 3.1 and 40% for Active Record 3.2, according to Bullet's developer, Richard Huang.

Michal Papis, over on the Engine Yard Blog, posted an update to the current status of RVM. And one major item to note is that rvm is now more stable thanks to a testing framework built around it, and that has enabled the team to now release RVM stable via, well, rvm get stable.

The framework – called DTF, or Deryl’s Testing Framework – allowed work to begin on RVM 2.0.

The RVM team is asking that everyone contribute their RVM use cases to make the test suite is as robust as possible. If you do something interesting with it, it would behoove you to add a test for it to make sure the functionality remains in the 2.0 release.

Jared Carroll released a great writeup over on the Carbon Emitter, where he details how you should test external APIs.

He walks through how to use RSpec and Capybara to write a failing integration test and shows how to make those tests pass step-by-step. He creates domain models, an adapter layer, shows how to stub collaborators when unit testing, and ultimately shows how to make the whole thing work, and even tosses in a little VCR to make it fast.

Code School is helping with the beginner track of RailsConf this year. Unlike previous RailsConfs where a tutorial day was held before the conference, this beginner track will parallel to the standard tracks.

We'll be running Rails for Zombies 1, Rails for Zombies 2 and Rails Testing for Zombies along with a bunch of smaller introductory talks.

Additionally, the 6 Ruby Heroes for 2012 have been selected and will be announced live in Austin.